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EgyptAir had tightened security in response to threats

Security officials with EgyptAir say two years ago threatening graffiti saying “We will bring this plane down” was scrawled on the jet that crashed Thursday. While the threat was likely tied to Egypt’s political tensions at the time, the airline responded by beefing up security overall, the officials say.

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Egyptian minister of civil aviation says the flight data recorders from the crashed MS804 have not been found.

By DECLAN WALSHNOUR YOUSSEFKAREEM FAHIM

Sat., May 21, 2016

CAIRO—In an eerie coincidence, the EgyptAir jetliner that plunged into the Mediterranean on Thursday was once the target of political vandals who wrote in Arabic on its underside, “We will bring this plane down.”

Three EgyptAir security officials said the threatening graffiti, which appeared about two years ago, had been the work of aviation workers at Cairo Airport. Playing on the phonetic similarity between the last two letters in the plane’s registration, SU-GCC, and the surname of Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, some workers also wrote “traitor” and “murderer.”

The officials, who were interviewed separately and who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the airline’s security procedures because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the graffiti had been linked to the domestic Egyptian political situation at the time rather than to a militant threat. Similar graffiti against el-Sissi, a former general, was scrawled across Cairo after the military ousted the elected president, Mohammed Morsi, in 2013.

Since then, the airline has put into effect a variety of new security measures in response to Egypt’s political turmoil, jihadi violence and other aviation disasters like the crash of a Russian plane that killed 224 people in October. EgyptAir has fired employees for their political leanings, stepped up crew searches and added extra unarmed in-flight security guards. Three such guards died in Thursday’s crash of Flight 804.

Whether those moves were sufficient remained an open question Saturday as experts pored over data emitted by the plane in its final minutes for clues as to what had brought it down. The French air accident investigation authority confirmed that the data showed that several smoke alarms had been activated while the plane plunged toward the sea.

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The investigators cautioned that the signals, sent by a monitoring system on board the Airbus A320 jetliner, did not offer enough information to conclude what had caused the crash.

Relatives and friends mourn the death of EgyptAir flight attendant Yara Hani, who was one of the 66 people aboard the plane that crashed Thursday. Investigators are still seeking the flight data recorders from the flight. (AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

“These are not messages that enable us to interpret anything,” said Sébastien Barthe, a spokesman for France’s Bureau of Investigations and Analysis. “If there is smoke, it means that there is potentially a fire somewhere, but it doesn’t tell us where the fire is, and it doesn’t help us establish whether it is something malevolent or something technical.”

The search in the Mediterranean continued Saturday in the area where debris including plane wreckage, luggage and body parts were discovered Friday. A senior official at the Egyptian Civil Aviation Ministry denied media reports that the flight’s cockpit voice and flight data recorders, commonly known as the black boxes, have been located. An Egyptian military spokesman said he had no information to share regarding the black boxes.

EgyptAir’s security procedures last came under scrutiny in March when a passenger on a domestic flight pretended to be wearing an explosive vest and forced the plane to land in Cyprus. The crisis was resolved within hours when the man, later determined to be psychologically troubled, surrendered. Egyptian authorities were quick to post surveillance videos that they said showed he had been searched before boarding the flight.

Among the 66 people, including two Canadians, on Thursday’s flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris were three EgyptAir in-flight security personnel — one more than the normal team of two for reasons that were not entirely clear.

EgyptAir security guards differ in several respects from the undercover air marshals who travel on American airlines. The Egyptian guards are unarmed and wear an understated uniform consisting of a dark blazer and a white shirt. When called on, they help crew members deal with unruly passengers. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds and earn a moderate wage of about $400 a month.

Normally, one security officer sits in the first economy row, behind business class, and the other is at the rear of the aircraft, two members of an EgyptAir crew said. During stopovers at foreign airports, the security officers are usually responsible for searching the workers who clean the plane and checking the credentials of all crew members or employees who board. They do not monitor the baggage handlers who load the plane’s hold.

Security officials said those procedures would have applied to the EgyptAir plane during short layovers it made at two African airports — in Tunis and the Eritrean capital, Asmara — in the days before the crash. But the procedure is different in Paris because European airports do not permit EgyptAir security officials to search local cleaning workers, a source of disgruntlement among Egyptian officials who feel they are being discriminated against.

French authorities are questioning airport staff who had access to EgyptAir Flight 804. Cleaning crews are among those drawing attention.

One theory is that a bomb could have been placed in the plane while it was on the tarmac in Paris, or at one of the two African airports, although there is no evidence so far of a bomb being aboard.

Sylvain Prevost, who trains Paris airport personnel, says cleaning staff are trained to alert authorities to suspicious items but specialized security personnel are not routinely required to sweep a plane after the cleaning crew leaves. In an email to The Associated Press, he noted that rules vary from airport to airport and said he was not aware of the procedures used when the EgyptAir plane was parked in Paris.

Prevost noted that despite extensive efforts to ensure security, workers can sometimes be threatened into co-operating with criminals.

Colleagues described the Egyptian security guards who died in Thursday’s crash — Walid Ouda, Mohammed Farag and Mahmoud el Sayed — as professionals who had exhibited no signs of unusual behavior. They described Farag as a lighthearted man who was often teased by friends for not having married, while Ouda cut a more taciturn figure and was polite to a fault.

Friends and relatives also presented a uniformly untroubled picture of the pilot, Capt. Mohamed Shoukair, 36, and his co-pilot, Mohamed Mamdouh Assem, 24. An EgyptAir pilot, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said he had worked with both and described them as professional aviators who had not exhibited any mental or social problems. At 24 years old, Assem was the average age of many co-pilots at the airline, he said.

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